The first time I played Doom 3, I got scared and went to bed. I\'m a pansy like that. I spent a good portion of my fourth and fifth years in life terribly afraid of my bedroom closest and Barney, and much of my adult life scared of republicans and Barney. I\'ve been scared enough, but for some reason I keep renting movies like the Exorcist and Gigili, and games like Resident Evil 4, The Suffering, and Silent Hill. Doom 3 is scary in an entirely different way; primarily it\'s scary because your character can\'t figure out how to wield a light source and a gun simultaneously. Even in co-op play, when you have a friend there to watch your back, it\'s still creepy. How are you supposed to relax around a partner that keeps his hands hooked into claws when he\'s not carrying something; who wants to work with someone that needs a weapon in order to keep from looking threatening? I mean, seriously?

In many ways, Doom 3 is such an easy target for a comic that we almost didn\'t do it. The game was so tremendously hyped before release that you couldn\'t help but shake your head when it didn\'t meet with stellar reviews. What makes Doom 3 so easy to pick on is that, while it does have really cool graphics and is very, very creepy, it does not have particularly progressive gameplay. In fact, many of its tricks are tried-and-true from the days of the original Doom, from the cheap-bastard demons that have nothing better to do than hide out in spare closest just so they can give you a good start before getting their heads blown off, to the flashlight thing. The game is creepy, but it cheats.

The no-gun-while-holding-light-source bit is particularly cute, making for interesting multiplayer games in which one person holds the flashlight on target while the other blasts away with the gun. There\'s at least one duck-tape mod on the internet for the PC version of the title that assumes that, while traversing the Mars base, you would find a roll of duck-tape stashed in a storage shed or something to duck-tape your flashlight to your gun. The original idea for this twoplayer was going to be the Doom 3 guy on his hands and knees in despair, gun at his feet, flashlight in hand, directly in front of a giant metal, padlocked door that reads, Duck-tape Storage. RESTRICTED ACCESS. For lack of a pass card, Mars was lost.

Alas, that particular vision didn\'t happen for a variety of reasons, probably because Noah and I have differing opinions on how complicated a comic should be. I lean towards one-joke, far-side style comics (like, Meet Xbox 2, We Do Damage!, and It Does Everything) and Noah likes more complicated comics with two or three jokes at a time (like, One Last Line and Meet Xbox 2 - Part 3). What we actually end up with tends to be a compromise.

Writing for a game comic that I\'m not drawing (I\'m not really any good at drawing) is interesting, because what I envision at the start is rarely exactly what we end up with as the final product. It\'s almost like having an exceptionally talented Photoshop plug-in for your brain. You form the idea, write what you think the dialog should be, the angles of each pane, then select, Make Cartoon, and wait to see what comes out the other end. Dialog often changes, ideas get modified, and poof, there\'s this final product that I get to hang on a wall.